The Mystic

Angels have talked with him, and showed him thrones:

Ye knew him not: he was not one of ye,

Ye scorned him with an undiscerning scorn:

Ye could not read the marvel in his eye,

The still serene abstraction: he hath felt

The vanities of after and before;

Albeit, his spirit and his secret heart

The stern experiences of converse lives,

The linkéd woes of many a fiery change

Had purified, and chastened, and made free.

Always there stood before him, night and day,

Of wayward varycolored circumstance

The imperishable presences serene

Colossal, without form, or sense, or sound,

Dim shadows but unwaning presences

Fourfacéd to four corners of the sky:

And yet again, three shadows, fronting one,

One forward, one respectant, three but one;

And yet again, again and evermore,

For the two first were not, but only seemed,

One shadow in the midst of a great light,

One reflex from eternity on time,

One mighty countenance of perfect calm,

Awful with most invariable eyes.

For him the silent congregated hours,

Daughters of time, divinely tall, beneath

Severe and youthful brows, with shining eyes

Smiling a godlike smile (the innocent light

Of earliest youth pierced through and through with all

Keen knowledges of low-embowéd eld)

Upheld, and ever hold aloft the cloud

Which droops lowhung on either gate of life,

Both birth and death: he in the centre fixt,

Saw far on each side through the grated gates

Most pale and clear and lovely distances.

He often lying broad awake, and yet

Remaining from the body, and apart

In intellect and power and will, hath heard

Time flowing in the middle of the night,

And all things creeping to a day of doom.

How could ye know him? Ye were yet within

The narrower circle; he had wellnigh reached

The last, which with a region of white flame,

Pure without heat, into a larger air

Upburning, and an ether of black blue,

Investeth and ingirds all other lives.